Olympics’ takedown of wrestling ‘gut-wrenching’

VANCOUVER — Nine-year-old Chris Wilson was watching the 1976 Olympics on television, rolling around on the floor with a brother between breaks when the freestyle wrestling popped up.

“I thought, ‘Hey, that’s what we do.’ And it kind of planted a seed.”

He went on to wrestle for Canada at the 1992 Olympics and win gold at the ’94 Commonwealth Games and silver and bronze at world championships. After his retirement, he served as an Olympic wrestling analyst for CBC for four Games and coaches at the middle school level in Coquitlam.

Like so many others in the sport, Wilson was stunned by the decision of the 15-member International Olympic Committee executive board to recommend wrestling not be maintained as a core sport for the 2020 Games.

“It’s been a long, depressing day already,” he said hours after hearing the early morning news.

SFU wrestling coach Justin Abdou, another former Olympian, called it “gut-wrenching, so hard for someone whose whole life has been about wrestling.”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me,” was the first reaction of Chris Fuoco, a former national level wrestler and the enthusiastic coach of the program at Vancouver’s John Oliver high school.

“The first thought that occurred to me was the kids in Grade 9, 10 and 11, those kids that are going to be 23 in 2020, that’s their Olympic year that they’re killing.”

That wrestling was effectively dumped — if the IOC accepts the recommendation in May, the sport will have to battle baseball/softball, karate, rollersports, wakeboarding, squash and sports climbing for one spot in 2020 — over modern pentathlon and taekwondo makes it even more galling.

“We’re up against royalty,” said Dave McKay, the Olympic men’s wrestling coach who just returned to Vancouver on Monday from an international tournament in Turkey.

“That’s one of the hotbeds of wrestling and there was no talk (of wrestling being on the chopping block), no nothing. It doesn’t sound right, doesn’t sound right to me. To get on the Olympic schedule, sometimes it has nothing to do with the actual sport being played. It’s all the other things, the money-making corporate games.”

His “royalty” reference was to the base of support that modern pentathlon, a seemingly outdated sport that combines fencing, running, swimming, shooting and horse riding, enjoys within the IOC. Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., son of the former IOC president, is a vice-president of the international modern pentathlon federation and member of the IOC executive board.

Royalty, politics and corporate influence are all a significant factor in the IOC’s backroom dealings. Taekwondo, plagued by judging and other scandals since its inclusion in the Olympics in 1988, is huge in Korea, where one of the IOC’s major sponsors, Samsung, is based.

Wilson, Abdou, Fuoco and McKay are all hopeful that a groundswell of support and the influence of strong wrestling nations like the U.S., Russia and Japan can force the IOC to reconsider.

“One thing we’ve got going for us is we’re a fighter by nature,” says Abdou. “The IOC is going to have a fight on its hands.”

But if wrestling is indeed dropped, he and the others are concerned about the sport’s survival, even in B.C. where it is strong at the high school and club levels.

“The long-term implications are going to be pretty substantial for our sport,” says Abdou, whose Clan teams enjoyed considerable success at the NAIA level and are now competing in the NCAA.

“We’re not a sexy, high profile sport and our big showcase is the Olympics. Wrestling is strong in the high schools and colleges, but a lot of that is based on the dream of making the national team and going to the Olympics.”

As Wilson noted, most people around the world call the sport Olympic wrestling, not freestyle wrestling. Fuoco says the singlets his kids wear identify them as being part of the John Oliver Olympic wrestling team.

And both of them noted how wrestling is such an inclusive and inexpensive sport.

“It really attracts kids that aren’t always drawn to the traditional teams, kids who don’t play on the basketball or the volleyball teams,” says Wilson, noting there are 300 kids at Coquitlam middle schools involved in the sport. “It’s a great sport for the misfits. It’s got different weight categories, so even if you’re the smallest kid in class, it gives you an opportunity to be on a level playing field.”

Fuoco, who doesn’t ever make cuts with his team, says he often gets kids signing up who’ve never played a sport before in their life. He talks proudly of an obese kid who signed up, lost 100 pounds, became a captain and secured a wrestling scholarship at university.

B.C. has also produced three female Olympians — 2008 gold medallist Carol Huynh, Lindsay Belisle and Leah Callahan — who came from small communities in the west-central and northern parts of the province. Huynh and Belisle grew up in Hazelton and Callahan in Mackenzie.

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